lives (Ibid). They ended up with
that result because that seems to have been the plan all along.
Towards the end of the book, the authors strike a rather wistful
note, a sort of elegy for a once powerful family that is now
fading into the background (The Rockefellers, p. 626). This is
extraordinary. Consider some of the things the Rockefellers
accomplished in the seventies: they were part of the effort to
quadruple gasoline prices through their oil companies; David
Rockefeller took part in the effort to get the American
government to intervene in Chile in 1973; the Trilateral
Commission, which the Rockefellers sponsored, funneled many of
its members into the Carter administration; in 1979, Henry
Kissinger and David Rockefeller convinced Carter to let the Shah
of Iran into the country for medical treatment. The reaction in
Iran helped give us Reagan-Bush. The rest, as they say, is
history.
In comparing the two books, one is immediately struck by a
difference in approach. Whatever the shortcomings of the
Rockefeller book, there is a minimal reliance on questionable
sources. And the concentration on individual lives very seldom
extends into a pervasive search for sex and scandal. This
difference extends to even the photos chosen for the two books.
The Rockefeller book is fairly conventional with wide or half